Wisdom of Anita Blake: Blood Noir edition

…all men are leery of their emotions, spook them and they’ll shut down. If you’re careful, quiet, not too eager, sometimes you’ll learn more. Of course, sometimes you have to club men over the head with some question to get any sense out of them, but they prefer to speak from a quiet place.

Sex is one of the most personal things we do as people. To have someone who says she loves you limit how you express yourself in the bedroom is like a small death. It kills the soul.

…BDSM took the most trust, the most communication. [personally I think polyamory beats out BDSM for this but I could be wrong]

It was one of the highs of BDSM, that possibility of disaster and pain…part of the game was that you looked into your lover’s eyes and let him see, that you saw the darkness in them. That you saw the potential for…evil, but you trusted that the wouldn’t do it. You trusted him enough to be helpless. It was a lot of trust to have.

BDSM was like stripping. Stripping was about the illusion that the customer could have the dancers for real sex. BDSM was about the illusion that you would truly hurt the person, that you would truly do exactly what the game pretended.

Sex isn’t about logic; it’s about what feels right.

If someone wants to hate you, you can’t stop them.

…sex was easy; hearts were hard.

Obsession isn’t love…It’s possession.

Fear was like cancer in remission. If you gave in to it, even by an inch, it would flare up again and eat you alive.

Marriage doesn’t cure you of being a bastard…Nothing cures you of being a bastard.

…bravery is being terrified and doing it anyway.

Sometimes grief will do that to you, make you attack random targets.

A real man is kind. A real man loves his family and treats them like human beings.

We’ve all dying…[some] know the checkout time and how much the bill will be.

…the noises you make when you know that the pain is so vast that nothing you can do will fix it. The soft It’s all right, when you know that it isn’t all right and never will be again, and perhaps never had been.

…[actors] collect mannerisms the way other people collect stamps.

Love, whether it’s friendship or more, is like a cup. It fills up drop by drop, until one last drop and the cup is full. The liquid hangs there almost above the rim, hangs there on the surface tension alone, and you can feel that one more drop and it will spill over.

When love isn’t on the menu, like isn’t a bad thing to be able to say, and mean it.

The rich and powerful always seem to prefer the tops of buildings. Hasn’t anyone ever explained to them that higher just means you have farther to fall?

You get a career, work your ass off for a reputation and you still end up being introduced as someone’s girlfriend.

That’s what underwear is for, girls, so if an emergency happens you only show your cookies to the people you love.

Sometimes the weird factor just goes too far for comfort.

Training; it will keep you alive and out of trouble with your superiors.

…sometimes there was no way to help everyone.

…the sad fact that once a woman lets more than one man touch her, some men think less of her. More than that, they think they should get a shot, too. A woman who will sleep with more than one man will do anything, right? Wrong…

Why was it that pretty people did petulant better than the rest of us?

Sometimes if people forget you’re there, you learn more. Silence can be a greater asset than any question.

…you can’t love someone who hates himself so much, and hates you for loving the parts of himself that the hates the most. It’s too complicated a dance to ever win.

Once you give up the idea of killing someone bigger and stronger than you are, you are, to an extent, at their mercy. You better home that they’re merciful.

Love is real, and false, even true love. Because love alone cannot keep you safe, if there is a trembling fear inside you.

People talk of sorrow as if it is soft, a think of water and tears. But true sorrow is not soft. True sorrow is a think of fire, and rock. It burns your heart, crushes your soul under the weight of mountains. It destroys, and even if you keep breathing, keep going, you die. The person you were moments ago dies…Gone. Everything solid, everything real, is gone. It is the crust of an earth where you can always feel the heat under you, the press of lava, that is so hot i can burn flesh, melt bone, and the very air is poisonous. To survive, you swallow the heat. To keep from falling through and dying for real, you swallow all that hate. You push it down inside you, into that fresh grave that is all that is left of what you thought the world would be.

Sometimes it’s not the light in a person that you fall in love with, but the dark. Sometimes it’s not the optimist you need, but another pessimist to walk beside you and know, absolutely know, that the sound in the dark is a monster, and it really is as bad as you think.

Men need privacy when they finally break down.

Gotta love a man who loves you in spite of, and sometimes because of, your little foibles.

“The Zeus devotional is lovely..reading it helped me to find a connection to a God I otherwise didn't know at all. I could feel His presence as I read the words and that.that's what a devotional *should* do.” -- Galina Krasskova